Go global

Go global Globalisation is a two-edged sword. Citizens of rich countries hope to wield one edge and be spared the other. People like me, employed in rich countries, are enjoying goods and services produced more cheaply in poor countries. Programmers in Bangalore (to take one example) are enjoying selling their services to the rich. The world price for programmer time is now set in India; it no longer supports family life in Essex. Programmers (and many others) here are feeling the sword's other edge.

» Debate at BBC News

Essex has been richer than Bangalore for a long time. There is no reason this should always be so, nor is that likely. Advances in transport and telecommunications erode the differences in productivity that have produced such sharply different standards of living.

But globalisation exploits more than advances in technology. We enjoy freedoms here that have nearly eliminated slavery and sweated labour from rich countries. These freedoms were won hard, and slowly, from a growing middle class whose appetite for cheap goods was eventually overwhelmed by revulsion at the squalid consequences. Or at any rate, the local, visible squalor; slavery and sweated labour could flourish over the horizon. Globalisation arbitrages that difference in moral standards.

Globalisation both exploits and threatens that difference in moral standards. The technology that binds Indian and Chinese producers more closely into our economy confronts us with the same questions Dickens posed the Victorians: should children suffer like this to bring you cheap coal and tin?

The controls that maintain this state are hallowed: import quotas and immigration controls. Citizens of rich countries, like myself, are largely free to wander the world and work where we wish. Similarly our businesses; the mobility of capital is the primary demand of globalisers. In contrast, in contravention of our espoused principle of free trade, we strictly control both where poor people can live and work, and what they can sell us. (The WTO is, in the paradoxical human fashion, the institution that both formalises and erodes this state of affairs.)

The liberal democracies — the rich countries, that is — are justly proud of our record of eliminating the domestic and colonial slavery and sweated labour long thought essential to the welfare of our dominant minority. But should we ever have to explain ourselves to a visitor from another star — or a deity — we should have a hard time distinguishing the present international system from slavery.

Become a champion of globalisation and declare it incomplete until it encompasses the free movement of not just capital, but also of goods and people.